The Raspberry Pi 2 offers a striking resemblance to its precedessors, retains its price point of £30, but with design issues ironed out and a stonking increase in performance. It’s a must buy. No, buy two or more; they are that good value.
Well, that’s a clear endorsement.
I really want to buy one but can’t decide on a project. What I don’t want is for it to end in a drawer! Come on OSNews inspire me!!
Buy one = help the foundation.
I was after project ideas! Have no qualms giving a british company making a good product. Just need something to do with it
Webcam,
XMBC (although couldn’t transcode so have a different solution)
Sphero controller!
and contribute to e-waste…
Overclocked Raspberry Pi works perfectly as an XBMC/Kodi box. RPi2 would work even better out of the box.
Like other cheap media players, the cost is still around $100 once you factor in all the accessories needed. But RPi is actually BETTER than $100 players like WDTV, Roku, and the random no-name alternatives. It works well and has a wide user base with good developer support.
An XBMC box and torrent downloader box, maybe? That’s the only thing this computer can do realistically.
It can’t be a good Android machine because of the ancient GPU, plus there is no official Play Store support, and it can’t be a Desktop Linux gaming-emulator machine because of a number of reasons (most Linux games are x86, plus the CPU and GPU are not enough for gaming or console emulation)
Maybe it can do web browsing too (so you ‘ll have a media center plus downloader plus web browser), but I am afraid the 900MHz Cortex A7 is theoretically but not practically up to the task (considering it has to render full websites instead of the mobile version, and power a full desktop browser).
PS: I never understood why people pay so much attention to Raspberry, when the ODROID series gives you much more for a little more money. No intention to brag, I am just curious why all the fuss about the R Pi, when the SoCs they choose are so low performance.
Edited 2015-03-07 16:02 UTC
I have to kinda agree on that. I’ve never known why people praise it as much as they do. I don’t think the Raspberry Pi is bad, just that it has overshadowed a lot of really great boards. ODROID, Beaglebone Black, etc. Every project I look at doing I can’t help but think there is a better board on the market for the task. I have yet to find anything the Raspberry Pi truly excels at.
Making you moan and complain
It excels at being cheap and consistent! That’s the point!
That it does.
I think it’s the price, which makes it an impulse purchase.
But when you consider the price of storage ($12), wifi adapter ($15), enclosure ($8) power supply ($9), keyboard-mouse ($10) and the shipping costs, suddenly the $30 or so the more powerful U3 asks don’t sound that much.
I don’t know, maybe I am a bit jealous, because it’s the tiny Raspberry Pi 2 that’s getting most of the community action, Windows 10 IoT and Ubuntu Snappy Core, rather than the more powerful boards.
Edited 2015-03-07 18:41 UTC
“But when you consider the price of storage ($12), wifi adapter ($15), enclosure ($8) power supply ($9), keyboard-mouse ($10) and the shipping costs, suddenly the $30 or so the more powerful U3 asks don’t sound that much.”
Any geek should already have a microUSB PSU, SD card, keyboard and mouse.
What reality are you from? The U3 is $180. As with the Pi, it requires storage, wifi, Kb, mouse, and shipping. Thats $145 more than the raspberry pi. Thats a lot of extra cost for a hobby board.
Edited 2015-03-08 04:07 UTC
I am afraid we are not refering to the same board. I am refering to this board:
http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G13874…
Probably you are thinking about the boards that have an “X” in their model name. I honestly don’t know how you got confused, since I never mentioned the X models, only the U3 model.
I bought the U3 in Autumn. It still has better hardware than the Raspberry Pi 2, CPU and GPU. It’s not cutting edge hardware, but still better than rocking an A7 900Mhz and a Videocore 4. And it costs only 30 bucks more.
For the software side, see my previous post.
Edited 2015-03-08 12:22 UTC
That’s almost twice the price. ID rather have two slower 4 core machines than 1 faster 4 core.
Of course, that depends on your use case. Most of my fun has to do with multi core processing scenarios, where a cheap package with 1 GB of ram and 4 cores for $35 is a crazy good deal. If you just want a single “desktop replacement” device, well I understand why you’d want more horse power in a device and be willing to pay the rather meager additional sum of $30 to get it.
the odroid u3 ?
just checked the hardkernel site – worldwide shipping $69.
sorry, I did in fact look at the odroid xu3. The names were so similar I thought that was what you were referring to. Still, twice as much as the raspberry pi is a lot for some people.
I know I already had all that already when I got one for an XBMC/Kodi setup. The only extras I needed were a case (which, combined with the Pi was still less than a Roku would have been) and an HDMI cable, which I would have needed anyway for a different box or Blu-Ray player.
Granted, I could spend extra money on a universal remote and a USB IR receiver, but the Android app works just fine and is free.
Upon upgrading I’ll set this one up as a jukebox alarm clock or something.
That’s something that is actually a bit concerning and something that is becoming a problem. The Raspberry Pi is getting all the attention because it has the largest community. Other boards are getting ignored because they don’t have a large community. They can’t build a large community because people are steering clear of boards that don’t have large communities. And as a result of having a small community, the media, developers, etc. are avoiding them which adds further to the problem of people not wanting to buy the boards and join the community.
The future of non-Pi boards will be a rough one. And because the Pi has not been completely open-sourced the community is somewhat protected against competition.
Well, consider that the Pi was designed for teaching children to program. The Pi is also funding a good cause versus profiting a company in it for making money. Then there is the fact that the Pi is open source, while the ODROID is not. Then there is price. Until the C1 came out this past year, the Pi was the only affordable option. The PI is a better option in general for children to experiment with. But, feel free to disagree.
Technically I would say the Pi is open source*. Open, except for the parts that are not. Particularly with the hardware. Full schematics have been lacking for some time. And then there is Broadcom.
Edited 2015-03-08 05:06 UTC
Broadcom have actually open sourced almost all the VideoCore IV used in the Pi:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/
Which gets you to nearly a hundred USB, which at that price why not buy something like the Zotac CI320 Mini? Its got an X86 Atom quad, so it’ll run rings around this, Linux on X86 simply has a lot more code, you can run games and emulators,Intel HD with quicksync means it’d make a powerful HTPC,etc, etc.
So while I can see this for little projects, HTPCs and STBs would be much better served IMHO by one of the cheap NUC style barebones you can get now.
Wow, that’s actually a great value too! Never came across that before.
Most things for Linux can be easily recompiled for ARM to run on a Pi. Yes, there are exceptions where devs have taken to assembler to optimize it, but those are few and far between, and optimizations usually go to C instead of Assembler these days – so you’re really only talking about the non-open source projects which are still the vast minority of software on Linux, and an even greater minority that most use.
The Pis are nice little devices that can do a lot of stuff – from being a desktop replacement, to running as servers, hosting media, teaching tools, and much much more.
And unlike their x86 brethren, they are extremely low power to boot, something that Intel and AMD simply cannot match with x86. Atom is no where near as good as ARM when it comes to low power; sure it’s great a performance in Intel’s expertise of Integer computation, but compared to an equivalent ARM it consumes a lot more power. That’s just the nature of the x86 designs.
I have the BB Black and the RPi and the BeagleBone Black gave me wayyyyyy more issues. It may have been specific to what I was doing, but the Raspberry Pi was a lot easier to do kernel things with in my experience (setting up PPS interrupt handlers, etc..)
Not quite accurate…
Minecraft, Battle for Wesnoth, Widelands, OpenTTD, Pingus, Supertux, Freeciv, Quake 3 all work. Also, you can emulate many consoles up to PSX and N64.
Its popular because everyone buys one, as yogi might say.
And yes, I bought one, because its popular. I’m not sure if you are aware of the state of ARM Linux, but it still kind of sucks with device tree and what not. All major linux distros have support for raspberry pi, I can’t say the same for the other boards.
I was almost tempted to get a hi key 96 boards prototype, but its twice the cost. I basically want a well supported low powered, low priced computer. That’s what the pis are. The 96 board ones are tempting because they have the potential to be even better supported, if they are built with UEFI/ACPI.
Home Automation sounds like fun. But I might start at home computer automation. Each computer at home has a core function. Currently I have to log into each individual box to figure out how its doing. With a pi, I think I’ll centralize that.
Yes, I know that there are tools that already do this. But I think there might be a neat way to do it that will extend to home automation.
I have a laptop running as a server, providing Owncloud, XMPP, Apache2, Transmission-server, Samba etc. In addition to that I have a beefier i7 – desktop running as my major fileserver for long-term storage and Plex Media Server and a somewhat less beefy Phenom II x4 965BE running as a backup – server.
I have lately been practicing my C-skills by coding a small tool to manage and monitor everything remotely, like, say, available HDD-space, SMART-status, CPU-usage, heartbeat, the status of any running services, and so on. I also added the ability to remotely control my Pioneer surround sound AV-receiver since it can be controlled over Telnet. I have never been good at programming so it has been a very educating project for me. Not to mention that it’s just simply sort of fun to do, even if there may already exist tools for that stuff.
Exactly, There is a middle ware tech I want to learn that I’m planning on using. I’d like to be able to intelligently distribute workloads on various machines of various capabilities with various priorities. So maybe doing something dumb and energy wasting like a stupidly written search for digits of pi, and then be able to fire off a higher priority job for doing something else like analyzing daily stock market results and using them as new input for the pi search.
Maybe I’ll call the system Euclid…
There are “mini-pcs” with better specs than this but the community support/involvement of raspberry is by leaps and pounds better than any other.
Add twolife’s apt repo, and your good to do all kind of beautiful stuff in Qt5 with lots of horse power left over.
I swapped the heavy weighter Udoo for the Pi2 in my last project (because I needed some offloading for CAN managment but I’d rather have an always on arduino)… Still need to put my car to pieces and 3d print some parts but I’m gonna make Renault be jealous of what I’m preparing for my Twizy:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ypszhywbgzrh5vy/twizyDash_screenshot.png?d…
I want a Udoo myself. I want to learn how to do Arduino-stuff, but also being able to use the same board for more power-hungry stuff and general computing sounds quite appealing to me. I have only a limited amount of money to spend on such shenanigans, so that also makes Udoo appealing; it’s a well-rounded board that can be used for a whole lot of stuff without needing any extra parts or anything.
That, I totally get, It is a very quick beast, nifty, sata and all, but way to much for my embedded project where I’d rather split the “arduino” side to offload the I/O as it would need to stay always on (and the 12v battery, that is needed to start the car, barely lasts a weekend under a 1/1.5W load (once started, no problem, the 100kg traction battery charges the 12v one, but I got stuck once and would love to avoid that happening again)
A separate MCU/Arduino board (I have a handful of Minions, ~= mini pro with an onboard rf12b) will handle the alarm system/rfid unlock/etc…
Naturally, 8-bit AVR MCU is fine for many tasks and cheap. However, board vs. board (Arduino vs. Raspberry) the cost is similar why the latter offers more horse-power (unless you need extra hardware within AVR: clocks, A/D converters etc.).
I don’t know if you can really fairly compare the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. They both designed for different purposes.
Excellent – don’t forget to let the ‘Top Gear’ team give you some free publicity!
Top Gear won’t be interested unless you shove a 6 Litre V8 in as well.
I have a Raspberry Pi 2 set up as a webserver, and also a NAS media server for my LAN. And as it is always on, I also have it plugged into the house TV. So it also is used to play videos and music from time to time (apologies to anyone using my website when I’m watching a video, im sure it must run slower)… But the surprise for me is that I also have libraOffice in there and frequently jump on and work on a spreadsheet, if I can’t be bothered to get my Laptop.
Is there already a accelerated x.org/wayland driver availible? Is the graphical user interface (except XBMC) usable?
My recent need for an extra box related to setting up a Minecraft server for my sons. ARM cpus, even the multi-core ones don’t seem to cut the mustard; due to limited FPU performance.
So what would I use this for? It lacks SATA for proper NAS or home server use and on the other hand it is silent and very low power.
So for me at this point it seems good for:
0) teenagers to experiment on!
1) sitting on the network and throwing out well timed ‘Wake-on-LAN’ messages.
2) hooking USB printers onto a network
3) hooking webcams onto a network
4) NTP server/ proxy
5) ?
For people with some technical muscles I suspect there are better options (Banana-Pi with SATA or the Odroid-C1 with quad core CPU).
For a learner/ teenager: the user community alone will set this apart from all the others.
It was created to used as a learning tool. So the point number 1 is the correct.
The others are valid, except the number 3. Add the 5 megapixel camera, the MJPEG-Streamer and you’ve got an excelent IPCamera. It can handle 30 fps at 1920×1080 but you will need a lot of space on the recorder. Also add a passive infra red sensor for better move detection.
You don’t need that amount of quality?. Ok the point number 3 is also valid.
Actually that sounds quite tempting for experimenting with (say) face recognition or automated number plate recognition.
Lower quality webcams are sweet but the pixelation does pall quickly. And you are right about storage though with intelligence you can store less and with networking you can put it elsewhere.
If you’re looking at the Pi (and the other similar arm based “for hobbyist” boards) as a desktop replacement, you’re doing it wrong IMO. You’ll need to add so many components that it will end as more hassle than getting an Atom.
If you want to run a single purpose server, or turn on your lights, or water your plants, then yes, by all means, get a Pi. Or any other board that has the peripheral buses you need.
After reading this thread I have to ask why anyone is comparing the raspberry pi to an ODROID. Yes they have similarities but they were made for two different reasons. The Pi was engineered to be enough computing power to teach programming on it and to do low level tasks. Remember that is was designed with children in mind. The ODROID was designed for hobbyists of a higher level. Hence some of them cost much more. The ODROID did not have to sacrifice features for cost or power concerns like raspberry pi did.
Another reason why the Pi gets more press is it has a better marketing campaign. People like groups who help others. Its what open source is all about. Who is HardKernel heping out?
Well, the ODROID have C1, which is same price with rpi, with better component. Just saying.
Did thy fix the issues with photo sensitivity yet?
http://hackaday.com/2015/02/08/photonic-reset-of-the-raspberry-pi-2…
Till they fix that I guess it’s not such a great platform.
Why? It doesn’t really make it worse as a platform and the workaround is simple, too: just apply a layer of nail-polish or bluetack or whatever non-electrically conductive and opaque material on top of the voltage regulator.
It is a silly issue, sure, but it’s easy enough to fix in future batches of the board.